Director feels natural empathy with misfits

Sunday

Sep 30, 2012 at 12:01 AMSep 30, 2012 at 12:49 PM

LONDON - The workplace of the filmmaker behind invitingly grim delights such as Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands is a definitive Burtonesque experience: On a hill in north London, behind a brick wall and a mournful tree, in a Victorian residence that once belonged to children's book illustrator Arthur Rackham, it lies at the top of a staircase guarded by the imposing portraits of Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee.

LONDON - The workplace of the filmmaker behind invitingly grim delights such as Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands is a definitive Burtonesque experience: On a hill in north London, behind a brick wall and a mournful tree, in a Victorian residence that once belonged to children's book illustrator Arthur Rackham, it lies at the top of a staircase guarded by the imposing portraits of Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee.

When Tim Burton, the master of the house, greets you, his drinking glass bears a poster image for The Curse of Frankenstein.

That the word Burtonesque has become part of the cultural lexicon hints at the surprising influence Burton, 54, has accumulated in a directorial career that spans 16 features and almost 30 years. Across films as disparate as Ed Wood, Alice in Wonderland and Big Fish, he has developed a singular if not easily pinned-down sensibility. His style is strongly visual, darkly comic and morbidly fixated, but it is rooted just as much in his affection for monsters and misfits (which, in his movies, often turn out to be the same thing).

He all but invented the vocabulary of the modern superhero movie (with Batman), brought new vitality to stop-motion animation (with Corpse Bride, directed with Mike Johnson, and The Nightmare Before Christmas, which Burton produced) and has come to be associated, for better or worse, with anything that is ghoulish or ghastly without being inaccessible. He may be the most widely embraced loner in contemporary cinema.

His success has also transported him from sleepy, suburban southern California, where he grew up and graduated from the California Institute of the Arts, to London, where he lives with his partner, actress Helena Bonham Carter, and their two young children.

Burton's new animated feature, Frankenweenie, will be released Friday. It tells the charming story of a young boy (named Victor Frankenstein) who reanimates the corpse of his pet dog.

What follows are excerpts from a recent conversation with the filmmaker.

Q: How much of your childhood are we seeing in Victor's isolation?

A: I felt like an outcast. At the same time, I felt quite normal. I think a lot of kids feel alone and slightly isolated and in their own world. I don't believe the feelings I had were unique. You can sit in a classroom and feel like no one understands you, and you're Vincent Price in House of Usher. I would imagine, if you talk to every single kid, most of them probably felt similarly. But I felt very tortured as a teenager. That's where Edward Scissorhands came from. I was probably clinically depressed and didn't know it.

Q: Were you encouraged to try sports?

A: My dad was a professional baseball player. He got injured early in his career, so he didn't fulfill that dream of his. He ended up working for the sports department of the city of Burbank. I did some sports. It was a bit frustrating. I wasn't the greatest sports person.

Q: That can be deeply disheartening at that age, to learn that you're bad at something.

A: It's the same with drawing. If you look at children's drawings, they're all great. And then, at a certain point, even when they're about 7 or 8 or 9, they go: "Oh, I can't draw." Well, yes, you can. I went through that same thing, even when I started to go to CalArts and a couple of teachers said: "Don't worry about it. If you like to draw, just draw." And that just liberated me. My mother wasn't an artist, but she made these weird owls out of pine cones or cat needlepoint things. There's an outlet for everyone, you know?

Q: Were horror films and

B-movies easily accessible when you were growing up?

A: They'd show monster movies on regular TV then, which they wouldn't show now. Some of them were pretty hard-core, like The Brain That Wouldn't Die, or something where a guy gets his arm ripped off and is bleeding down the wall.

Q: There are emotions and experiences in Frankenweenie that audiences don't often associate with Disney features.

A: People get worried and they go, "Oh my God, the dog gets hit by a car." It's funny how people are afraid of their emotions.

Q: If Pee-wee's Big Adventure and Beetlejuice hadn't been hits, would that have been the end of your career?

A: I always felt bad for people whose first movie is a gigantic hit. They were movies that were under the radar in a certain way. They're both low-budget in terms of studio movies. Both were moderate hits and were on some of the "10 worst movies of the year" lists. I learned quite early on: Don't get too excited, don't get too complacent, don't get too egotistical.

Q: When you worked with Johnny Depp for the first time, on Edward Scissorhands, what connected you to him?

A: Here was a guy who was perceived as this thing - this Tiger Beat teen idol. But just meeting him, I could tell, without knowing the guy, he wasn't that as a person. Very simply, he fit the profile of the character. We were in Florida in 90-degree heat, and he couldn't use his hands, and he was wearing a leather outfit and covered head to toe with makeup. I was impressed by his strength and stamina. I remember Jack Nicholson showed me this book about mask acting and how it unleashes something else in a person. I've always been impressed by anybody who was willing to do that.

Q: Having a life with Helena Bonham Carter, do you have to be more careful about how you use her in your films?

A: The great thing about her is that, long before I met her, she had a full career. She's also willing to do things that aren't necessarily glamorous or attractive, and I admire her for that. We've learned how to leave things at home, make it more of a sanctuary. But I probably take a slight extra moment to think about it.

On Sweeney Todd, it was quite rough. Nobody was a singer, so I looked at lots of people. Everybody had to audition for it; she did as well. That one was a struggle, because I felt like, jeez, there's a lot of great singers, and it's going to look like I gave this one to my girlfriend. She really went through an extra process.

Q: Is it a danger when you have a style that's so distinctive, it becomes boilerplate and imitated?

A: It does bother me a bit. People thought I made Coraline. Henry (Selick, who directed Coraline and The Nightmare Before Christmas) is a great filmmaker, but when they say something, they should have to say the person's name. "From the producer of " - well, there's eight producers. It's slightly misleading. Not slightly, it's very misleading, and that's not fair to the consumer. Have the courage to go out under your own name. But I don't have any control over that, and it's not going to make me change. I can't change my personality. Sometimes I wish I could, but I can't.

Q: Do you think that overfamiliarity might have been a problem with Dark Shadows, that people thought, "I've seen this before"?

A: It may not have set the world on fire, but it made its money back plus some, so I can tick that off as not being a total disaster. There's some people that I talk to that liked it. Alice ( in Wonderland) got critically panned. It made over a billion, I guess, whatever. Ed Wood got a lot of critical acclaim; it was a complete bomb. It all has a weird way of balancing itself out.

Q: What would you want your legacy to be?

A: What do I want on my gravestone?

Q: It sounds like something you've thought about.

A: I do. I think it's wise to plan ahead. Start early - plan your funeral now. It's not a morbid thought. . . . The thing that I care about most - that you did something that really had an impact on them. People come up on the street, and they have a Nightmare tattoo, or little girls saying they love Sweeney Todd, and you're like "How were you able to see it?" Or you see people, especially around Halloween, dressed up in costume, as Corpse Bride or the Mad Hatter or Sally. It's not critics; it's not box office. Things that you know are connecting with real people.

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